


Limit Break

by etherati



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Carlos has had it with your crap, Cecil is Human, M/M, Protectiveness, Swearing, catastrophe of uncertain origin, management had it coming, mild violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-10
Updated: 2013-09-10
Packaged: 2017-12-26 05:52:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/962378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etherati/pseuds/etherati
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are only so many bad managerial decisions that can be tolerated, especially if you want the show that's being managed--and the man attached to it--to survive. </p><p>Or: The one where Carlos almost breaks his hand. On management's face(??).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Limit Break

**Author's Note:**

> Just a silly ficlet from the kinkmeme (yes I have discovered the KM now, and the situation can be summed up in three letters: FML.), for the prompt that Carlos gets fed up with one of the terrifyingly dangerous forces in the town and does something everyone has always been afraid to do. Edited slightly from original version.
> 
> Timeline is post-"Dana". There's a tiny spoiler there, but if you haven't caught up yet you probably won't even catch it.

*

The walls shake, sickeningly. They shake like they're trying to shake something off.

"We have to _go_ ," Carlos says, just barely reigning in the urge to grab the microphone's cord and rip it out of wherever it's plugged in. _Whoops, look at that,_ he'd say. _Guess the broadcast's over for tonight._ "Now, okay? There's no more time."

"I can't."

"I know, I know, your audience. Who are all still listening in the middle of a blackout, I'm sure."

The building shakes again, bucking and diving. It's not an earthquake; Night Vale has slept through Richter nine tremors and today's readings had barely scratched a four. Underneath the violence of pavement tearing like tissue paper outside and the roaring of the building twisting on its foundation, there's a faint, pretty sound— today's weather report, a three-four experimental piece from, according to Cecil, yet another European country that no one's ever heard of. The vocalist sounds like she could be Scandinavian, like Björk's second cousin run through a woodchipper and then autotuned. In that order. 

At least, he thinks, the backing music is nice. Sort of a piano kind of thing. It trills along, coming muffled out of Cecil's headset while the walls scream.

"It's not about whether anyone is listening," Cecil says in the gap between rumbles.

"Of course not." Carlos splits the blind slats with two fingers, peers between them. There's not much to see. It’s very dark out there, or very smokey. "That would make sense."

Cecil shakes his head, distracted. His phone is buzzing on the desk next to the soundboard, and the laptop on the side table has a severe storm map pulled up, satellite and radar showing a deep black disturbance centered over an unlabelled spot on the map. Weather Underground doesn’t know Night Vale exists, Cecil’s explained, but their radar feeds are still pretty good at picking up whatever natural or supernatural disturbances roll across the community. He just has to plug in the right coordinates. None of this makes up for the fact that the website is utterly silent, playing none of the deeply independant musical interludes their name implies, but hey! They know their storms.

“Cecil.” Carlos doesn’t turn to look back, is frozen in place peering through the split in the blinds. “Cecil, there’s… there’s a shape in the smoke out there.”

“I can’t.”

“I can’t tell what it is.”

“You don’t _understand_ ,” Cecil pleads, flipping a few switches, preparing to come back from the weather. “I’m not _allowed_. Management would—”

Carlos just nods loosely; he gets it. It doesn’t matter. “Cecil, something’s coming.”

Cecil jerks his head up, finger frozen over the blinking mute button. His voice goes flat and strange. “What did you just say?”

Carlos finally shakes out of his terrified daze, and when he meets Cecil’s eyes, the other man’s expression is shocked and full of recognition, twisted up in violent deja vu. It galvanizes him into action.

“I said _something is coming_ ,” he shouts over the sudden roar of wind and fire outside the windows. He moves around the desk, all but rips the headset off of Cecil’s ears, grabs him by one arm, and suddenly Cecil isn’t fighting him anymore. 

The only thing he does as Carlos hauls him from behind the desk is reach out with his free hand and smack the panic button on the soundboard; across the room, a dusty old reel-to-reel springs to life, a remnant of the days before digital broadcast, and it probably hasn’t been turned on in thirty years. A pre-recorded emergency message starts going out over the airwaves in a voice that isn’t Cecil’s, wavery and urgent: _Citizens of Night Vale, an emergency has been detected that we cannot continue to broadcast through; please stay in your homes—_

That’s all he hears, dragging Cecil out into the hallway and toward the staircase. His heart is jackhammering, high in his throat, and the corridor feels longer than it should even as the walls crack and the floor tumbles, and everything’s going in stop-motion and he stumbles over something and Cecil careens into him and he looks down to see what exactly he had tripped over and it’s _moving_ , it’s slithering away into an open doorway and oh, _oh shit_.

The door hanging open on its hinges, spilling darkness and despair and a noise like a wombat making love to a chainsaw into the hallway— it has a placard next to it, an unassuming affair in brass and black.

It says: _Management_.

*

“No no no no,” Cecil hears himself babbling; behind them, the hallway is crumbling. There’s no getting back to the booth now, no way to appease them, and they’re going to lurch out of that room at any moment and absorb Carlos and then absorb him too, and it’s exactly what he’d been afraid of.

Because something is always coming, for a loose definition of ‘something’.

He scrabbles for a grip in Carlos’s coat, tries pull him back, a useless instinctive recoil away from a stimulus that screams blood-soaked, screaming danger. But Carlos isn’t having any of it—he shakes free of Cecil’s grip, pushes him away back down the hallway, and strides forward toward the door. His face is furious and a little bit unhinged, like he’s finally snapped, run out of patience for life and is ready to toss it aside for the chance to get one last swipe in. 

Leaning off-balance against a wall that’s crumbling under his weight, cracks snaking up and up to the ceiling and beyond, Cecil can only brace himself for whatever’s to come, close his eyes and wait for the screaming to start.

The screaming doesn’t start. 

Instead, Cecil hears, distant, “I’ve had _enough_ of your micromanaging _bullshit_!” He opens his eyes just in time to see Carlos’s coat tails disappearing as he storms _straight into Management’s office_ , and oh no, that’s it, there’s no way he’s coming back out now. A sharp keening fills Cecil’s head, neurons bubbling and spitting in instant, inconsolable grief. No one has ever—

“So just sit down and _shut the hell up_ , or the broadcast won’t _ever_ come back!” comes the voice from the office, and then there’s a sharp unearthly squeal along with a sudden retraction of darkness and slithery appendages back into the office—and Carlos _comes back out._

He’s shaking out his right hand, grimacing and flexing the fingers painfully, and he winces and looks at Cecil and says, “Come on, down the stairs.” 

Cecil just nods blankly and follows.

*

“Your hand,” Cecil says later, once they’ve retreated into the storm cellar of a nearby building. It’s the closest thing to a shelter they’d been able to find while running through the open in a miserable hellscape of falling chunks of cement and black-burning fire and lightning striking just _everywhere_. There are a few other refugees huddled down here with them, but they’re mostly in shock and keeping to themselves.

Carlos picks it up and looks; it’s a black and blue mess, and it’s possible some of the small bones are broken. It’s also a little green across the knuckles in a way that isn’t normal for bruising, but that’s a mystery that’ll have to wait until later.

Cecil takes the hand into his own, cradling it gently, exaltation at their impossibly improbable escape gradually being crowded out by worry. He presses a kiss to the discolored ridges, speaks against Carlos’s skin. “We’ll have to find someone who knows class-B7 dark magic,” he says. “I wouldn’t trust fingers to anyone else.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve never known how to throw a punch right.”

Silence for a moment, and then Carlos feels a fit of giggling bubble over, terrified and relieved and full of exuberant panic. “I can’t believe I…”

“You punched it!” Cecil interrupts, and he can’t hold it in either, laughter deeper and richer but just as hysterical. “You punched it in the face!”

“It didn’t have a face, oh god.”

“You punched it in the whatever! You just… No one’s _ever_... I can’t believe you…”

Carlos sobers a bit, swallowing down the laughter with a hiccup. “I can’t believe I did it either.” And then: “I can’t believe it actually _worked_.”

Just the horrific noises from outside, battering on the steel trap doors above, for a moment. 

“I hope it’s not a problem for you later,” Carlos says.

Cecil blinks at him, white eyes luminous in the dark space. “Oh, I’m sure it will be. But they will have calmed down a little by then, don’t you think?”

“Had time to think through just what eating you would do to the station’s ratings, you mean?”

“...hopefully.”

Something large and wet hits the doors above them; a foul-smelling fluid drips down through the cracks in the frame. Despite all that they’ve seen, they still don’t know exactly _what the hell is going on out there_ , but that’s fine; for once, Carlos is just as happy to stay here and not know, to let this place’s devastating strangeness wash over and past them and just… go with the flow, do whatever has to be done. Don't over-think it.

He flexes his hand carefully in the air between them, folding each finger in sequence, counting all the ways in which that has turned out to be far easier than he ever anticipated.

*


End file.
